The concept of quantitative aesthetic is dictating much of our personal taste. It’s about the number of streams, of followers, of tickets sold that will tell whether something is worth our precious time or not — In an article published by the end of March at ArtNews, Ben Davis presents the concept of “quantitative aesthetic”, that is, how popular taste has been dictated by metrics and statistics or how preferences can be quantified — a term that, by the way, has been popular in the tech…

Researchers mapped recurring entities being shown to users of DMT. With new techniques that extend the experience under the psychedelic drug, it might be possible to understand more about them — Planned for publication in 2024, The Illustrated Guide to the DMT Entities is a book written by the researcher David Jay Brown and the artist Sarah Phinn. Their objective is to map the entities with which DMT users have encountered with the help of illustrations created with the generative artificial…

Directed by Alice Birch and streaming on Amazon Prime, the series update the classic body horror flick by adding some bits of American Psycho to it — Recently released on Amazon Prime, the minisseries Dead Ringers updates the movie with the same name, directed by David Cronenberg. Both titles are inspired by the book Twins, written by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland. The series is directed by Alice Birch, already known for her work on The Wonder…

Since the development of the telegraph, new technologies and their supposedly unlimited possibilities are prompting us with hopes of innovation that go beyond industrial applications — The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke became famous not only for his books, such as Childhood’s End or the cinematographic collaboration with Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey. …

Despite the outrage caused by such news, how willingly are we to give up on our privileges and comforts after realizing many of them come at the cost of other beings' suffering? — Maybe you already heard about this field in robotics called soft robotics, which aims to design robots with an anatomy similar to living beings, mostly animals. …

Understanding the way other species see and interact with the world could change not only our relationship with non-human animals, but the way we interact with machines — Last week, I published an essay in which I addressed how recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) could help us read brain scans and then “translate” them into what the patient was seeing during the exam. Ultimately, this same technology could help us understand how other species see the world…

A recent study used Stable Diffusion to reconstruct images shown to patients. Its accuracy has led scientists to question whether the same tools could be used to also understand other species’ perceptions of the world. — You know that expression seeing with someone else’s eyes? The fact is that we are getting closer to making this possible with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) and brain-computer interfaces (BCI).

Instead of relying on CGI and headsets, the metaverse could one day be rendered through our dreams and catalysed by machines — This is exactly the question posed by Joakim Vindenes, PhD candidate in virtual reality (VR) at the University of Bergen, in Norway. In an essay published in 2021, the researcher suggested that lucid dreams (that is, the ability to consciously control what happens in your dream) were better than VR…

And it begs the question whether portraying a drug addict or alcoholic would be as shocking to us today as it is seeing someone killing themselves through the overly consumption of something necessary to life. — Warning: a few spoilers ahead. When the movie The Whale was announced, there was all the commotion around the coming back of Brendan Fraser after all those years of neglect. The reason why this once Hollywoodian favorite was absent from the silver screen for so long is that in 2003…